Close Encounters of the Sergio Corbucci kind…

Here’s an interesting bit of information I’d never come across before. During the filming of Companeros, Sergio Corbucci claims to have seen a flying saucer! Here’s a translated interview with the director from c1983:

Interviewer: Meanwhile, here’s another testimony, that of Sergio Corbucci, a director who glimpsed a UFO years ago. How did this happen?

Corbucci: Oh yes … we were filming a movie during the end of the day in the sunset, we were doing a close-up of an actor Volodymyr Palahniuk, i.e. Jack Palance, and I looked up into the sky behind him and saw a strange object. It wasn’t just me, but all the crew, a strange inverted bell like a top with big, big balloons, transparent, it was in the sky and swaying, almost still a lot of time… so we shot this thing and so we thought it was just a strange thing, then whne we returned to Madrid in the evening and reported it to the officials, we heard of similar reports, and some people had taken similar photographs….

Interviewer: Ok, here we see the image that was shot by the Corbucci’s cameraman

Corbucci: Here, this is the object exactly as you see, a kind of inverted bell that has these big balls, and I figure that this had to be about at least two or perhaps three thousand metres away, maybe more, but if it was even further away it would be as big as aircraft carriers. The strange thing, you see, is that these are the same ones that were seen in Madrid,

Interviewer: And this isn’t the original document, what happened?

Corbucci: Well, returning to Madrid that evening I was approached by some…

Interviewer: We were told officials

Corbucci: Perhaps officials. In short, the U.S. embassy staff asked me if they could see the original material that was in the lab, I agreed. It was laboratory material, but I made a copy of everything and then I gave them the original

Interviewer: Which disappeared, ufologists say that now it’s maybe in Washington in some top secret place.

Corbucci: So the strange thing, perhaps more than anything else, is that then the next day I saw another thing … we were going to move to another location the next day, about 250 km away… we were all talking about what the papers were saying when we arrived to work at Cuerca, and again we saw the same object, but unfortunately this time we didn’t have the camera because we were still waiting for it to arrive…and this object was approached by military aircraft… it stayed a long time, then disappeared…

Apparently the story was confirmed by Christian De Sica (was Christian De Sica anything to do with Companeros???)

The WildEye is a blog dedicated to the wild world of Italian cinema (and, ok, sometimes I digress into discussing films from other countries as well). Peplums, comedies, dramas, spaghetti westerns... they're all covered here.